The Smaller Picture

The collective consciousness was attempting to create a television.

Frame:
You can browse the history of this picture, or view it as an animation.

New pictures being created :
castle apple bird human head cat sofa sword

Previous pictures :
cup boat map of the world telephone star umbrella stick person Great Britain tree lamp spiral heart anything word bucket question mark monster face wineglass chair banana arrow car anything bee landscape spider flag fish circle computer house flower goat letter

Created by Kevan Davis in July 2002, based on Kevin Kelly's account of hive-mind audience emergence.
Each picture starts from a randomised grid. There have been 15886 flips to this one, so far.
See also: the official Typophile Font spinoff and Tom Rankin's filtering of it.

Other people have built much better emergent art projects
since this went live in 2002, most notably Swarm Sketch, Pixelfest and TheBroth.